Japanese Foreign Ministry Confirms Late Discovery of Chinese Hacking Incident

It was belatedly revealed that the diplomatic cable system used by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan and overseas diplomatic missions to exchange confidential information had been attacked by Chinese cyber attackers, leading to a leak of the contents.

According to the Japanese Yomiuri Shimbun, multiple Japanese government officials revealed on the 4th that the U.S. government informed the Japanese government in the summer of 2020 that the network of Japanese overseas diplomatic missions was exposed to China. The U.S. did not disclose how it detected the attack or the specific contents of the leaked information at that time, Yomiuri reported.

A “diplomatic cable” is a telegram used by a government department in charge of diplomacy and overseas diplomatic missions to exchange official instructions and reports. It uses a special cipher and a closed network separate from the usual Internet because it includes various confidential matters, such as top-secret information obtained from foreign governments. Yomiuri pointed out that it is extremely unusual for the diplomatic cable system, which requires particularly high confidentiality among official documents, to be breached. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan refused to confirm the facts to Yomiuri for information security reasons.

At that time in 2020, the US responded swiftly, with Paul Nakasone, director of the National Security Agency (NSA), visiting Tokyo in person, holding talks with senior Japanese government officials, and conducting working-level consultations between the two countries. Yomiuri reported that the fact that the top executive of the NSA moved in person means that the US took the situation very seriously and that the US even asked Japan to open the systems of major government agencies.

However, the Japanese government showed reluctance and agreed to share the results after conducting an independent inspection. Accordingly, the Japanese government inspected the systems of several agencies, including the Ministry of Defense, the National Police Agency, the Public Security Intelligence Agency, and the Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office, which handle confidential information and agreed with the US to improve vulnerable programs.

It was at the end of the Shinzo Abe administration, that Japan began to modify its security strategy and to review the possession of “enemy base attack capability (counterattack capability)” due to the rise of China. Yomiuri mentioned this background and observed, “It seems that China targeted the diplomatic cable with the intention of extracting confidential information related to China shared by the US and Japan and the review situation [of security strategy] within the Japanese government.”

In fact, this is not the first time China has hacked the Japanese government. The Washington Post (WP) previously reported that a large amount of information was exposed due to an attack by Chinese hackers on the Japanese government’s confidential security information network at the end of 2020. At that time, Hirokazu Matsuno, the Japanese government spokesman and the Chief Cabinet Secretary, denied the report, saying, “It has not been confirmed that the defense ministry’s confidential information was leaked due to a cyber attack [by Chinese hackers].”

In November last year, the Japanese government pointed out China as the culprit behind a cyber attack on the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), which resulted in possible unauthorized access to the internal network. JAXA is also participating in the US’s manned Moon exploration program, the “Artemis Program.”